Speaking at CLS and Oscon and shouting at Portland Timbers next week

Vacation is almost over - and it's still 17 degrees outside :-( It's time to start packing for Portland.

I'm as excited as ever, since this year I'm delivering 2 talks. Both fall into the category which is a long time passion of mine - open source community and business. It's refreshing to not have to talk about databases for once :-)

CLS

The Community Leadership Summit is mostly an unconference, but in recent years have started adding short 15 minute pre-arranged talks. (Kind of like morning keynotes, even if they don't call them that.) On Sunday the 19th, I will be do a talk called Open Source Governance Models Revisited.

This is an update on the topic first presented on this blog in 2010, and later as an Oscon talk in 2011. Out of all the things I ever ranted about on this blog, this (superficial) research has surely been the most impactful of all. While statistics failed to convince the powers behind the Open Database Alliance, the results were used for example inside Rackspace when debating the formation of the OpenStack Foundation. Other foundations have also cited them to justify their work, such as Outercurve and CloudFoundry.

Now, 5 years later, I have some exciting update to share. There are new mega-ecosystems to talk about: Hadoop, OpenStack and CloudFoundry. The IaaS space within the last decade has seen an interesting battle between 4 open source products, 2 of them governed by foundations, one by a single vendor and one who shifted from single vendor to the ASF. This provides like a clean laboratory-like setting for observing benefits of either approach.

But what is most exciting is that as open source business has matured, more and more companies have publicly announced some financial statistics. This allows us to research the primary question directly: If I'm only in it to make money, what is the best IPR governance model for my open source product?

If you're coming to the talk, as home work you can collect financial statistics of (in your opinion) successful open source companies, and we can see who is winning! (While Red Hat is well known, few people correctly know the second largest open source company. Wanna guess?)

Oscon

For Oscon, I'm presenting a brand new talk: Selling open source 101. The intro of the abstract already gathered some positive and curious feedback:

As open source has become mainstream and a business, many companies face a knowledge gap and may not even realize it: most executives and sales managers have no particular experience in the dynamics of open source. Unfortunately, most open source folks have no experience in sales either, so they are not capable of advising the other group.

While I consider myself somewhat technical and certainly very open sourcey, I have been lucky to work in various businessy roles for several open source companies, and in particular the MySQL and MongoDB sales force I consider to be world class in what they do. The talk is based on my experience from these companies. I would like to give special credit to Joe Morrisey, who has been my boss at both MySQL and MongoDB and encouraged me to write the blog posts leading up to this presentation.

Portland Timbers

I'm a huge soccer fan and still an active player myself. In the MLS I'm a Portland Timbers fan, even if I have never been to a single MLS game :-( That will be corrected on this Saturday, when I will be seen in the Timbers army section. If you want to join me, read more here. I would love some company!